Somewhere, somehow—I can’t really put my finger on it. There’s a heaviness that slips through when it finally finds a way, but I won’t pretend it’s only the bad stuff that escapes.
Occasionally, strands of thin, unanchored joy waft through as well, and I get a bit distraught. Because, you see, I’m greedy. I want every bit of what’s mine—everything I have fought for, everything I have dug deep into the recesses of human experience to reclaim as I pulled myself back together.
I want to keep all of it.
Which is, of course, impossible. Nothing stays sealed.
Not grief, not memory, not happiness. You can build a life with better walls, stronger doors, a more discerning sense of who gets a key, but eventually something seeps through. A song. A date. A smell. A sentence you weren’t prepared for.
Or, more confusingly, a perfectly ordinary Tuesday when you are sitting somewhere you chose, wrapped up in the comfort of your favourite throw, drinking something you like, and suddenly you realise you are happy. Not euphoric. Not transformed. Just happy. And even that can feel like a loss when you have spent so long learning how precious happiness is.
I think that is the part I resent most: that even joy is porous.
And that breaks my heart. Because after everything, I wanted ownership.
I wanted the clean arithmetic of having endured something terrible and therefore being owed something whole in return. A whole heart. A whole future. Whole mornings. Whole friendships. Whole love. I wanted the suffering to have purchased certainty. I wanted to be able to point to the years I had survived and say: see, I paid for this.
This belongs to me now.
But the feeling of belonging, I have come to understand, is a poor measure of what will stay. I had treated it as permanence, as something rigid and fixed while life moulded itself around it. But the feeling of belonging is instead so much more alive—it gathers, settles, changes shape, moves on. What is mine is rarely mine in the permanent, possessive way I would like it to be. And my mistake, perhaps, is thinking that impermanence makes the having any less real.
That if I chase hard enough and pursue like a stealthy predator, what is meant to be mine will remain.
So now I make space for another feeling. Budding, but present. The relief of wanting anything at all.
Because wanting, for a long time, felt dangerous. When you operate from survival, desire begins to feel like an indulgence.
You stop asking yourself what you want and become very good at identifying what you can withstand. What can be managed. What can be salvaged. What can be made to work. Your life becomes an exercise in containment, and somewhere along the way, wanting gets confused with risk.
So I became disciplined about desire. I wanted carefully. Casually. With exits clearly marked.
But desire does not particularly care for good governance. It arrives where it wants. In people. In places. In work. In a version of your life you did not know you were ever capable of picturing.
And lately, I have begun to understand that the wanting itself may be enough.
Not because I have figured out exactly what I deserve, or where all my standards now sit.
I am still learning that. Still learning what I will accept, what I will walk away from, what I want badly enough to risk asking for.
But I no longer want every beautiful thing, feeling or thought to arrive carrying the threat of its ending. I don’t want to meet joy by immediately calculating its expiry date. I don’t want tenderness to become a warning, desire to become a liability, or hope to feel like evidence that I have once again failed to protect myself.
Some things can belong to me because I experienced them fully, not because I managed to keep them.
And maybe that is the leak I have been trying so hard to locate. Not a failure in the structure at all, but an opening.
A place where grief seeps out and joy slips in, but also where joy escapes and grief finds its way back. Where longing leaves me, then returns in another form. Where certainty drains away and possibility enters; where possibility, just as easily, gives way to doubt.
I had been so focused on what I was losing through the cracks that I forgot a leak goes both ways.
Maybe the point is not to seal myself shut. Maybe it is to become less afraid of what moves through me.
Disclaimer: I use AI as part of my drafting and editing process. The ideas, experiences, perspectives, and final direction of the writing are entirely my own.